The Air Force's Secret War On Unemployment
Ognibene, Peter J.
The Air Force’s Secret War On Unemployment by Peter J. Ognibene Time was when a code of honor prevailed between the Pentagon and Capitol Hill. If you were a general or an admiral with a weapons...
...Unfortunately for Rockwell, Seiberling was not impressed...
...Rather, they read like a justification for a government make-work project in the tradition of the WPA or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society...
...The purpose of the B-1 is to deliver nuclear bombs to targets in the Soviet Union, in case the Minuteman missiles and Polaris-Poseidon submarines should somehow fail to accomplish that task...
...Another local plant, General Electric of Evendale, is building the engines for the B-1...
...A B-1 production goahead would mean over 69,000 direct aerospace jobs and 192,000 total jobs at program maturity...
...Everybody knew the rules, and it was a comfortable arrangement for all involved...
...When the Pentagon pushes weapons systems these days, it gives the same argument Detroit offers for its cars: Buy Now, not because you need the product, but because people are out of work...
...Most people look only at the money the Government spends-and nothing else...
...If we look at B-1 funding in the context of the totaleconomyas a businessman looks at the return on his gross investment, we find that the $2.7-billion development phase and the $8.6-billion production phase would add over $31 billion to the Gross National Product including over $25 billion in personal income, and would add or support 192,000 jobs at all levels in our nation’s economy...
...Although it was little noticed by the press at the time, Tunney had clearly hit on the solution to one of the major problems of our time...
...Behind Seiberling’s contention are calculations like that of a study, “The Empty Pork Barrel,”” conducted by the Public Interest Research Group in Michigan (PIRGIM...
...Crediting this to the B-1, the net investment for national security would probably be less than $1.9 billion...
...This is the return on the Govern me nt ’s gross investment that could be used to support our domestic programs...
...The charts and papers Rockwell’s lobbyists brought to Seiberling’s office said curiously little about the B-1’s military purpose...
...Using a means of analysis conceived by Bruce Russett, a professor of economics at Yale, the group calculated that each additional billion dollars spent on the military results in a net loss of 10,000 jobs nationwide...
...But elsewhere in the defense establishment, the old ways are changing, and with them the style of military logrolling...
...but if that billion had been left in the private sector, it would have created 65,000 jobs...
...The tax receipts from this gainful and productive B-1 employment should exceed $9.4 billion...
...There are fewer jobs per billion dollars in defense, and except for California and Texas, most states suffer unemployment as a result of defense spending...
...These tax dollars can be used to fund such vital domestic needs as schools and hospitals...
...This is aside from the primary purpose of the B-1 as Peacekeeperyou can’t put a price tag on peace...
...To cut back the nation’s expanding work force would be like trying to stuff the ‘Eagle’ back into its egg...
...When Rockwell turned from the national impact of the B-1 to its effect on Ohio, the Job Corps rhetoric was supplanted by the sound of the sloshing pork barrel: “A B-1 production go-ahead would ensure approximately $1.45 billion of firm production business in addition to the current $400-million prototype engine program, and would present additional potential of $585 million of airplane and subsystem business in Ohio...
...The $2 billion already spent on the plane has meant contracts and jobs for more than 5,000 businesses in 48 states, and more money would mean more wealth for all...
...Even now a few people keep the tradition alive, most notably the current Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, whose congressional tes timony suggests that he has taken on Oswald Spengler as a speechwriter...
...1 think the people in this country are finally catching on that you don’t create jobs by spending on defense,” says Seiberling...
...If you were a general or an admiral with a weapons system to promote, you felt obliged to make the gesture of warning about the dangers of unpreparedness...
...We also made a study,” he told me, “and found that the actual amount of B-1 funds going into our district was less than the taxes paid...
...This is the long term economic potential for Ohio if the B-1 production program reaches maturity as currently planned...
...Available from P.I.R.G.I.M., 61 5 E. Michigan Ave., Lansing, MI 48933, for 25 cents a COPY...
...This is in addition to the $10,527,345 B-1 prototype business...
...Workers thus employed could return, in the form of taxes, approximately $7 billion to the federal government and an additional $4 billion to state and local governments...
...This total Ohio business input of almost $2.5 billion could, in turn, generate approximately $6.6 billion gross state product, including $4.6 billion disposable income, $790 million state and local tax receipts in support of Ohio’s domestic priorities and $1.3 billion federal tax receipts in support of the nation’s domestic priorities...
...The genius of the B1 promoters was to realize that these monumental costs, which had proven such an impediment to weapons proposals in the past, could actually be turned into the plane’s strongest selling point...
...He’s right-except about those places which, unlike Akron, stand to take in more money from defense expenditures than they lose in taxes or private business...
...Cranston restricted himself to a hymn of praise for Rockwell’s management of the program, but Tunney delved into the intricacies of macro-economics...
...Consider, for example, the conduct of California’s two senators, Alan Cranston and John Tunney...
...And that seems to be just the sort of impression Rockwell would like to create among legislators: don’t think of the B-1 as a weapon of mass destruction, think of it as a “pre gram” whose “gross investment” will create “jobs” and turn the “unemployed” into “taxpayers capable of supporting our domestic peacetime priorities...
...Two paragraphs from the section entitled “National Economic Impact” convey the flavor as well as the substance of the company’s pitch: “Throughout the United States 26,000 people are now gainfully employed directly on the B-1 program and more than 44,000 additional supporting non-aerospace jobs make for a national total of over 70,000 jobs today...
...So, spending, say, $5 billion a year on the B-1, its operation, and support, would mean 50,000 fewer jobs in this country...
...The 14th district’s total B-1 program potential of $70.5 million could, in turn, generate $1 33 million disposable personal income (after tax...
...Someone who had never heard of the plane would be hard-pressed indeed to figure out just what a B-1 is if all he had to go on was this company blurb...
...In other words, you don’t have to ‘cut metal’ on the B-1 in order to benefit from it...
...If your new nuclear missiles were designed to obliterate half of Central Asia, you were expected to take the trouble of planting a few news stories and handing congressmen a few prepared speeches about the Peril from the East...
...So we were really coming out of it $14 million shy...
...So both the state and district would apparently “benefit” from a decision to produce the plane...
...In fact, he had quite a different objection in mind, one which challenges the fundamentals of the porkbarreling approach: “We’re short of capital in this country,” he said, “and defense procurement does not produce many jobs...
...This work force, if unemployed, would become ‘tax users’ instead of taxpayers capable of supporting our domestic peacetime priorities...
...Peter J. Ognibene is a contributing editor of The New Republic...
...Stated that way, it sounds as if Seiberling would come around if only Rockwell could find $15 million more for the businessmen of Akron...
...The B-1 bomber p r e gram, which occupied Congress’ attention this spring, is the clearest example of this new look in American militarism...
...By the time Rockwellgot down to Seiberling’s district, its lobbyists were practically counting the nickels and dimes involved in contracts for main and nose gear tires, impact attenuators, crew capsule flotation devices, and wheel and brake assemblies...
...This is a function which many people feel is quite adequately performed by the current fleet of B-52 bombers, and which, in any case, becomes quite expensive when performed by B-Is...
...In the offices of Rockwell International, the primary contractor for the B-I, someone discovered that the offending word “cost” could be restated as “jobs,” and that the B-1 could be portrayed as the $50billion solution to the unemployment problem...
...Except for the vague references to “national security” and the “Peacekeeper,” there are no clues which would lead one to conclude that the B-1 is a nuclear weapons carrier...
...Using an economic ‘ calculus remarkably similar to that of the Rockwell propaganda sheets, Tunney argued: “A gross investment of $13.6 billion during the life of the program could generate a rise in the GNP of approximately $37 billion, which in turn would be a function of over 60,000 aerospace jobs and over 100,000 supporting jobs throughout the country...
...The approach of Rockwell lobbyists to one of the bomber’s bestinformed critics, Representative John F. Seiberling (D-Ohio), is a classic illustration of the soft sell that more and more defense contractors are learning to adopt...
...A billion dollars spent in the defense industrial sector produces about 55,000 direct and supporting jobs...
...Yet when the ?3-1 was under attack last year by cost-conscious liberals, the two men took to the Senate floor in tandem to celebrate its many virtues...
...Seventy million dollars was being spent for jobs and such, but the district was paying about $84 million out of its taxes for the B-1...
...With that for an appetizer, Rockwell then served up its main course: “A B-1 production go-ahead would present a potential of approximately $60 million new business in Ohio’s 14th district...
...The city of Akron, which accounts for much of Seiberling’s district, annually gets $75 million to $100 million in defense business for items such as aircraft wheels, brakes, tires, and tank tracks...
...In the six years since the Air Force made its planning estimates, the projected cost of each plane has risen from $36 million to $85 million, and may go higher still...
...The contracts to local firms were listed in five-, six-, and seven-place figures down to the last dollar for the research and development program...
...The over-all voting records of both are ranked hgh in the ratings compiled by the liberal Americans for Democratic Action and low in those of the conservative American Security Council, which has extensive connections with defense industrialists...
...Disease, illiteracy, unemployment, and Russians, too, will all yield to the mighty B-1...
...Many of those places are in California, and California’s most liberal legislators have embraced the Rockwell thesis with unseemly enthusiasm...
...Coincidentally, Rockwell’s calculations of direct and supporting jobs per billion dollars spent on the B-1 closely approximate the PIRGIM figure...
...The total cost of the B-1 system, with its 241 bombers, 300-odd tankers, new avionics, maintenance, and the like, may easily exceed $50 billion...
Vol. 7 • July 1975 • No. 5
